LINGUIST List 17.847

Mon Mar 20 2006

Sum: Recursion in Children's Rhymes

Editor for this issue: James Rider <riderlinguistlist.org>

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Directory         1.    Jill de Villiers, Recursion in Children's Rhymes

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Message 1: Recursion in Children's Rhymes
Date: 18-Mar-2006
From: Jill de Villiers <jdevilsmith.edu>
Subject: Recursion in Children's Rhymes


Regarding query: http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/17/17-470.html#1

Dear Linguist List,

I recently posted a query asking linguists to consult their memories of childhood, especially in other languages, to help us in compiling a database of children's rhymes (nursery rhymes, skipping rhymes, songs, those in verbatim folk takes etc.) that display recursion (NP, PP, S - even event recursion interests us.)

We received about a dozen responses, and in the course of them we did add a few to our database. Many people mentioned the classic poem that is part of the Passover meal, the Chad Gadya, originally in Aramaic. We learned about a rhyme from Chile that is in roughly the same form as "the house that Jack built", and a popular Italian song. We are still missing rhymes from many areas of the world's languages, especially lacking African, indigenous American languages, Slavic and East Asia, so please keep writing to us!

At present we have the following possible recursion examples, but virtually all from Indo-European languages.

Please continue to email us as jdevilsmith.edu

Thanks! Jill de Villiers

File Name Language ALLA FIERA DELL'EST Italian CI VUOLE UN FIORE Italian Da kamen alle Hunde German Estaba la rana sentada Spanish In A Dark Dark Forest English Korean Song (still untranslated) Korean L'ARBRE EST DANS SES FEUILLES French La Casa Que Pedro Fez Portuguese ''La Chiva'' (The little she-goat) Spanish London Bridge English One Dark and Stormy Night English Rattling Bog English Summerisle English The Death and Burial of Poor Hen-Sparrow Urdu? (only translation available) The Domicile Erected By John English The Grain of Corn Punjabi (only translation available) The House That Jack Built English The Key of the King's Garden English The Man Who Jumped English The Old Woman and Her Pig English The Song That Never Ends English The Story of the Little Old Woman and the Lamb Welsh (only translation available) The Twelve Days of Christmas English The Want of a Nail English There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly English There's A Hole In My Bucket English There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea English This Is The Key of the Universe English Un Hoyo en el fondo de la mar Spanish Une Perdriole French Who Knows One? Hebrew Chad Gadya - One Little Goat Aramaic/Chaldaic

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition Syntax